Fresh ideas for building a Christ-centred community

Faith in Homes

It's here! Family Jesus Timeis up for grabs and the BRF gnomes are poised at the warehouse, eagerly awaiting your order. (Maybe not gnomes: warehouses are a mystery to me. Could be pixies.)

This is a happy minibook. Jane, Martyn and I enjoyed pulling it together and arguing about what discipleship means. How many family discipleship books have you got which feature a holy hat? How many of those theological hardbacks on your shelf mention washing an elephant?

I hope by now you’ve seen the easy-to-use Discipleship Pilot we’ve created for Messy Churches. It’s a simple and straightforward tool to get your team talking about what you might do to make and grow disciples in your Messy Church. In this short blog, I’ll focus on the first suggestion in it: that of making disciples by encouraging families to do faith in their homes. In following blogs, we’ll look at the other suggestions.

The Messy Church team have put together a 'Maximising the Mess' guide with some helpful advice on 'Encouraging families to live out faith in the home' part 2. The guide is for families and churches to give you some reassurance about how to get started with Christianit

The Messy Church team have put together a 'Maximising the Mess' guide with some helpful advice on 'Encouraging families to live out faith in the home'. The guide is for families and churches to give you some reasurrance before you start to talk about faith in the home.

Please take for granted all the usual caveats about being wary of what we mean by a ‘family’. For the purposes of this blog, I mean a group of people of all ages living together and more or less dependent on each other and that might mean anything from a single dad and three children from different relationships to a step family, to a mum, dad and six children to a widowed grandparent bringing up a grandchild.

Congratulations to Canford Parish Church, Wimborne, Dorset, Breakfast@9 group and St Catherine’s Church, Crook, County Durham! Both churches were inspired by Renita Boyle's Gingerbread Nativity book and baked, decorated and displayed their Nativity sets at crib festivals and services. Churches Together in Crook linked the idea with their Messy Nativity Sheep Trail.

The Gingerbread Nativity uses the popular tradition of making and decorating gingerbread houses and biscuits to explore the themes of Advent and the story of the first Christmas. It includes instructions, diagrammatic illustrations, recipes and top tips for making, baking and decorating, as well as fake or no bake and allergy-free alternatives. It also includes Advent reflection and discussion starters for each session; 25 'taste-a-day' family activities; ideas for a gingerbread themed family service and 'choose and use' ideas for adapting the material for use in other settings.